Philosophy

by

Bing-bing-bing! Ricochet Robert.

I’m in a rather unusually bad amount of pain this morning, even for me, so please excuse me if my thoughts are somewhat incoherent or distracted or grumpy-seeming.  Though I don’t know how you would be able to tell if I’m grumpier than usual.

It’s Monday yet again, and it’s only been two days since my last post, not three, because I worked on Saturday, and on that day, I also wrote a very angry blog post.  I think some people might have found the degree of malice I expressed on Saturday disquieting or at least just not good, which I can understand.  I tend to think of such terrible things a lot more often than most people do (though I share them only infrequently); it’s one of the reasons I find my own company unpleasant.

But, of course, I’ve tried to compensate for my dark tendencies by doing as much good in the world as I’ve been able to do, such as by becoming a doctor.  I’ve never actually acted on any of my darkest impulses and dreams, except when I write horror stories, or when I write non-horror stories with horrible elements in them.

I guess maybe that’s one of the things that’s been therapeutic for me about writing fiction.  Maybe the trouble is right now that I don’t have a good outlet for my terrible thoughts.

Of course, I know that the idea of thoughts and emotions as “substances”, as if some manner of fluids, which can build up and need release is not merely incorrect, but is not even a good analogy for how emotions and other neurological states work.  This is part of why meditation is far more effective against stress and tension than is, for instance, the often counterproductive notion of catharsis.

Of course, sometimes things that work well for neurotypicals don’t work nearly as well for those on the autism spectrum*.  For instance, there is apparently some reasonable evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy, which often works quite well for neurotypicals with depression, is not as effective and can even be counterproductive for autistic people; we already tend to over-self-evaluate our cognitions, and so the tricks and workarounds of CBT often are not merely redundant but miss the issues entirely.

Along a line of possibly similar nature, I’ve written before about how meditation often serves to reduce my anxiety but at the same time worsens my depression.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I think it’s all a matter of neurological states‒or neurohumoral states if you want to be slightly more precise.  I’ve spent nearly my whole life interested in such things; still, I have found neither evidence nor argument that has so far persuaded me that there’s any significant credence to the notion that humans are anything but temporary patterns of matter/energy, “spontaneously” self-assembled like any termite mound/colony or beehive/swarm**.

Once that pattern breaks because it can no longer sustain itself, due to injury or age or what have you, there is nothing more to it; it’s a hurricane that has passed.  There can be records and traces of its passing, and the damage it has done can linger for a long time, but there is no “afterlife” for weather patterns.

People are more complicated than hurricanes, at least in some senses, I will admit that.  But more intricate complexity doesn’t tend to make things more durable; it makes them more fragile, ceteris paribus.

Of course, all else is almost never equal.  Nevertheless, it’s often useful to consider complex matters as partial differential equations in more than one variable***; one explores the equation by holding all but one variable constant and differentiating or integrating along only one variable at a time.  As long as one thinks carefully about such things and never forgets that one is holding the other variables constant‒and by not forgetting, hopefully avoiding the oversimplification of one’s model of reality‒one can penetrate a great deal by recognizing when powerful tendencies persist even given the fact that other variables can influence matters.

For instance, the metallicity**** of stars influences the size at which they undergo certain levels of fusion, which is why it is thought that the earliest stars had different lifespans and luminosities relative to mass than later stars (like our sun).  But they still, overall, behave like stars, and the bigger ones shine brighter and last a shorter time than the less massive ones.  They are more alike than unalike, the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding.

Well…that tangent, or series of tangents, sure took me down unexpected paths!  But I guess that’s the nature of tangents; in any nonlinear but continuous function (even one as simple as a circle), there are a functionally infinite number of possible tangents.

I think that’s the right mathematical metaphor; isn’t it?  I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I’m just expressing my highly stochastic thoughts (I doubt they’re truly random) as they come.  But they would probably follow different courses if I did not express them in this fashion.

I hope your own thoughts are less troublesome to you than mine are to me and that you are at least at some degree of peace with yourselves and with each other.  You might as well be, though I know that’s not enough to guarantee it.  Still, do what you can, okay?

*Which I am, as you may know; I have written at least in passing about my recent, quite late, diagnosis.

**I don’t mean “like” here as “the same as” but rather “in the same fashion as”.

***My terminology is a bit sloppy here, but I’m not trying to be mathematically rigorous, I’m just trying to get my thoughts across with some clarity and accuracy.

****To astronomers/astrophysicists, a “metal” is any other element but hydrogen and helium (this no doubt irks chemists).  The earliest stars would have been almost entirely hydrogen and helium, certainly to start off.  Mind you, even later generation stars like the sun are still by far mostly hydrogen, but seemingly small “contaminants” can have noticeable effects on big systems, as in the fact that water vapor and carbon dioxide markedly affect Earth’s atmosphere and surface temperature despite being present in tiny amounts compared to nitrogen and oxygen.

by

“What IS real? How do you DEFINE ‘real’?”

Well, it’s Friday again, as happens if one waits long enough, but it wasn’t Thursday here yesterday.  Okay, well, that’s an exaggeration, obviously.  I simply didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick‒I ate something that chose to take vicious, but thankfully temporary, revenge on me for having eaten it‒and when I don’t go to the office, I don’t usually do a blog post.

It would be a somewhat interesting universe if time were constrained in some fashion by my blog post writing, or even defined by it.  Of course, that’s pretty vanishingly unlikely, since it would not readily be able to explain all of history‒including my own life and memories‒from before I started writing my blog and before blogs even existed.

There are philosophical and mathematical prestidigitations that can be performed that can allow one at least entertain the notion that all those memories and all those historical records are in their present configuration by mere chance, but such arguments tend to bite themselves in the ass by destroying all basis for believing in any specific laws of nature, including the probabilistic/entropic ones that, in principle, allow for such things.

Anyway, here I am, heading to the office on Friday, the first “real”* day after Wednesday, though I’m still a bit beat.

Given that last fact, I hope you’ll excuse me if I’ve nothing profound or even interesting to say today.  It’s the tail end of a week that should or at least could have been one of reasonable celebration, if I were inclined to consider the fact that I have lived another year something to celebrate.  Alas, I don’t have any strong inclination to consider that so, and I guess that’s just as well, because it hasn’t been a very good week for me.  I feel exhausted, and this is only “first thing in the morning”.

I don’t think I actually am literally exhausted, in the sense of being completely and thoroughly used up, because I am, after all, going to work and writing this.  A car with no gasoline does not even start let alone move**.  Whereas I am still moving, and contrary to some popular sayings, one cannot keep moving out of spite or stubbornness or whatever similar notions might be applied.  I don’t mean to dismiss the power of stubbornness, let alone of spite, but they do not (and cannot****) allow one to violate the laws of physics.

I am simply very fatigued‒physically, yes, and also emotionally, mentally, even “spiritually”, however that last word might be defined.  I don’t know how close to the bottom of my personal tank I really am.  Goodness knows, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have died at least twelve years ago, or even twenty.  I did not die (as you might be able to tell), so in a certain sense, my surprise is that I am alive.  But it’s not much of a happy surprise.  I certainly don’t feel any giddy joy over the fact that I have gotten through all the nonsense in my life so far without it killing me.

Still, it would be churlish and pathetic of me (perish the thought!) not to admit that there are still moments and occasions of joy and even happiness (which John Galt described as a state of noncontradictory joy, and I rather like that interpretation of the word).  But it would be nice to have occasional truly pain-free days.

Oh, well.  The universe does not conform to anyone’s wishes nor bend to the best interests of any given individual or even all individuals‒not as far as I can see.  But if the world did bend to my will in such matters, then all my readers would have a wonderful day today, and that would be the start of a long‒perhaps unbroken‒string of wonderful days hereafter.

And heck, everyone else might as well have wonderful days, also.  For it is difficult even for the most prosperous to be reliably and persistently happy in a world where there is gross injustice and undeserved misery.

*If by “real” we mean “days defined by the writing, by me, of one of my blog posts”, and if by “me” we mean the first person objective singular pronoun referring to Robert Elessar, the author of this blog (among other things).  But, of course, we don’t mean such a thing when we use the word “real” and though I define “me” that way, you would probably define it differently, but in very specifically different ways.  This is all just me (the same “me” from earlier) being somewhat silly.

**Well…unless it’s an electric car (or even a diesel*** powered car).  Ideally, one probably doesn’t want any gasoline in an electric car.  Gasoline in an electric engine is just a fire hazard.  It’s not a good conductor, so it probably wouldn’t cause the engine to short out directly, but once ignited, the fire could create local ions/plasmas that could conduct electricity and thus, among other things, short out the workings of the motor.  That would probably be among the least of the problems such fire caused, though.

***I once knew a guy who modified an old diesel Mercedes so that it ran on peanut oil.  Due to economies of scale, it was actually more expensive to drive than other cars, but at least it ran on a renewable fuel, of sorts.

****This is definitional, in my view:  anything that actually happens is, perforce, allowed by the laws of physics.  If you find something that seems to violate the laws of physics as you know them, that’s just an indictment of your understanding‒of the events and/or of the laws of physics.  This isn’t a horrible thing; it’s a chance to learn something new.

by

If the vacuum collapses, everything gets messy

It’s Wednesday morning now, and I feel slightly better than I did yesterday, which should probably be no surprise.  I went back to the house last night, and I had a decent sleep‒for me, anyway‒and no major evening issues.  Now I am working my way toward the office.  It’s payroll day, so it should be at least mildly more hectic than most other days, but it shouldn’t be too unbearable.

Well, it shouldn’t be unbearable at all.  I mean, the state of being unbearable or not is a purely binary thing, isn’t it?  Either something is bearable or it is not.  If something is unbearable, then it cannot be borne.  So, saying something is not “too unbearable” is probably almost always nonsensical.  I suppose one could imagine something being only just unbearable, so that one could almost be able to bear it…but not quite, and one would finally be forced to succumb to whatever outcome that entailed, despite one’s possibly heroic struggles.

In some ways that sounds like it could be worse than something being thoroughly and unequivocally unbearable.  If one can see that something is truly unbearable, one will probably be less likely even to try to bear it.  One would not bother attempting to style out the brunt of a supernova; if one could not get far enough away, one would presumably just close one’s eyes and grit one’s teeth and take what comfort one could in knowing that the explosion will probably happen and obliterate one faster than any nerve impulse could propagate.

That’s one of the (tiny) comforts about the possibility of there being a “vacuum collapse” of the universe, in which the present “dark energy” vacuum state could, hypothetically, quantum tunnel down to a lower, truer vacuum state than the present one*, releasing that potential energy drop in such a way that wipes out all currently existing particles/fields.

This would erase everything in our visible universe (the “visible” part is deliberate and crucial; do you see why?**) in a sort of wave of collapse that starts at the site of the first state change, like the propagation of ice crystals forming in hitherto supercooled water.  But though it would be a shame, from our point of view, it would be one we would never experience, since the bubble of state change would expand at the speed of light.  It would thus be literally impossible to see it coming, because once you could see it, it would already be there, and you would be wiped away before you could possibly be aware that it was happening.

By the way, this possibility is “only” hypothetical; we aren’t even sure it could happen, not least because we’re not sure whether the vacuum state of the universe is as low as it can go or not, among other things.  But don’t worry:  if the vacuum collapse of the cosmos doesn’t kill you, something else will.

Even my truly immortal vampires in Mark Red might be wiped out by vacuum collapse.  I suspect they would, which might be a comfort to many of them, so to speak.  Of course, that would depend very much on how the “supernatural” forces in that book’s universe interact with the vacuum state and other quantum fields.  It’s not inconceivable that they might survive even that.  How’s that for horrifying?

These are odd thoughts for a Wednesday morning, aren’t they?  I mean, on a Thursday they wouldn’t be that odd, and even less so on a Friday.  On a Saturday they would be almost boringly predictable.  But on a Wednesday morning?  That’s just, well…odd, as I said.

I’m being silly.  My apologies.

I guess it’s more uplifting than is the prospect of universal Armageddon***.  Though, really, the Tao te Ching (in the version with which I am familiar) encourages us to embrace death with our whole hearts because that will help us to be prepared for most everything else we can encounter.

It does not encourage us to love death or to seek it; quite the contrary.  We are merely encouraged to accept it, not just intellectually but viscerally, to internalize***** it.  This is one of those curious circumstances in which the Tao to Ching and the movie Fight Club give the same advice, which is no indictment of that advice in either direction.

I try not to indulge in the vice of advice, but I will express my hope that every one of you who reads this post today or any of my other posts has a particularly good day, today and every day hereafter.

You’ve suffered enough already.

*This is analogous to what is thought to have happened when the “inflaton” field dropped down to a much lower energy level about 13.8 billion years ago, releasing the differential energy as the very hot soup of elementary particles that eventually became the universe we see.

**Okay, fine, I’ll explain.  It’s not just that the wave is expanding at the speed of light and so one would “see” it only as it hits.  But, given the current, accelerating expansion of the universe, the wave of change could never, even in principle, reach areas of the cosmos that are outside our cosmic horizon, because those places are receding from us faster than the speed of light/causality.  There is no causal influence from us that can ever reach them, or vice versa (assuming no wormholes or warp drives or similar).  Likewise, someplace beyond our horizon****** could be collapsing already, but we need never worry, because that collapse is not going to reach us (unless it changes the rate of overall cosmic expansion or even reverses it, which is not inconceivable.  We might then find ourselves in (or near) an anti-deSitter space, in which case, well…yeah).

***Not to be confused with the often misused**** term “apocalypse” which is basically just synonymous with “revelation”.  It’s become associated with the end of the world (and with lesser catastrophes) because one of the alternative titles of the book of Revelation is “The Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine” or whatever they called that nut bar.

****That rhymed, and it had a good rhythm too, both quite by accident.  I did that in yesterday’s or Monday’s post as well, but I didn’t call attention to it.  Can you find it now?

*****I would love to be able to use the term to grok it as in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, but much as when Fuckerberg stole the term “metaverse” from me, likewise Elon Musk and the would-be tech boys who idolize him have arrogated the term “grok” and made it embarrassing to use.  Don’t even get me started on the disgusting theft of the word Palantir by Peter Thiel.  He deserves to be tortured interminably for the unmitigated gall he has shown in daring to use that term, but I would accept his immediate, painless disintegration and that of his company.

******Speaking of horizons, it is interesting to wonder what a vacuum state collapse would do to currently existing black holes.  I suspect they would basically be impervious to it, since the vacuum state is something that exists within spacetime, with the gravitational field as the backdrop of other quantum fields, but we don’t necessarily know enough about quantum gravity to feel very sure, as far as I know.  I suspect it might change the specifics of Hawking radiation at the level of the event horizon, and thus change the specific rate of black hole decay.  Also, I think in the first rush of particles generated by such a vacuum decay, most black holes would grow briefly with the influx of newly released energy all around them that had previously been bound up in the vacuum energy.  But that’s just my initial intuition.

by

The return of the Desperado?

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that I don’t feel as overwhelmed as I did yesterday/Wednesday evening.  I’m not sure what has made the difference‒I have a hard time recognizing my own emotions, let alone decoding them‒but I got some good advice from an old* friend yesterday.  First, there was just the blunt confirmation that, yes, this stuff was in my head (which I knew in principle, but sometimes it pays to get it from outside oneself, particularly from someone who knew me since before I had even met my now-ex wife).

This friend also gave me the good advice that, if I don’t know what to do, I should just do nothing, and not worry about it too much.  Those are my words; he put it better.  He also gave me a meditation reference/link that was helpful.  I like meditation in general, though I have to be careful with it, since sometimes it can soothe anxiety but make my depression worse.  I strongly suspect that, if I could just stick with it, that side-effect would fade, but it’s quite intimidating, since my depression is often literally life-threatening.

I also want to apologize in general, and in spirit, for the implicit (but not intended) disparagement of my youngest child in yesterday’s post.  They definitely don’t deserve anything but praise and affection and love from me, and I mean the word ”deserve” here, despite it being a word I think often has no useful meaning in the contexts in which it is used.  I could not be prouder and more delighted than I am with my child (and my other child as well, except that I would be much more delighted if he would “speak” with me).

Okay, let’s not dwell too much on that stuff.  That’s the kind of rumination that can start a spiral.

In other news, I decided yesterday to start reading what I have written so far of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, just to see if I liked it and maybe, perchance, if I would want to pick it up and work on it again.  It’s one of three stories on which I have at least a beginning (the other two are Outlaw’s Mind and HELIOS, though the latter is only barely begun).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s any good, because as far as I can recall, I haven’t received any feedback on DFandD or Outlaw’s Mind, though I have posted them here.

If someone out there did give me feedback and I have forgotten, I do apologize.

Anyway, so far I quite like The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  It’s got some subtle, meta-level humor in it, and the two characters therein are figures I’ve probably drawn more pictures of than any other, even Mark Red.  I’ll embed a few of them here, below.

I don’t know if I’ll pick back up on any of these stories, but I welcome any input from readers, though I cannot promise I will follow your recommendations.

Part of me thinks it would be most fun to write HELIOS.  Some of that feeling is because he/it began as my idea for a comic book superhero waaaay back when I was little**.  Also, since I’ve barely made a start on that story, I could in principle try to write it on Google Docs on my smartphone, but overlapping to a larger computer when desired.

Although, that latter plan suffers from the drawback that my mini-lapcom doesn’t really get internet access when I’m commuting, so access to Google Docs is limited.  Also, to be honest, I can write MSWord documents from my smartphone as well; it’s just that the phone app for that word processor is much more cumbersome and less fluid than is Google Docs, though the latter is not as good a word processor overall.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  I don’t have to do anything, as my friend said, though it’s so hard for me to internalize that, when I’ve spent my whole life doing goal-directed behavior, and thinking that I really had to do things, to be productive, to achieve, in order to justify my continued existence.

But what if my continued existence isn’t justified?  What if no one’s is?  That seems reasonable and consistent with observed facts.   Perhaps it is merely the case that those things that exist do exist and that’s really all there is to it.  If you exist, then you are a fact in the universe.  It cannot have been any other way than to have you in it, once you are there.  If you were not in it, it would not be the same universe.  And it is the same universe.

That all doesn’t quite merit a QED (unless one refers to quantum electrodynamics), but I think it’s pretty definitive, nevertheless.

So, for now, I’ll just exist and not worry too much about doing anything.  This is reminiscent of the wu wei advice of the Tao te Ching, which I like, and other great old eastern philosophical traditions.  Not that I like them because of their age or where they arose; that would be silly.  I like them because they make sense.

Anyway, below are those pictures with which I threatened you.  Some of them are pretty good, I think, for a truly self-taught amateur.  I still would definitely appreciate any feedback about my partly-begun stories and what your thoughts are on which you might be most inclined to want to read.  No matter what I do, if I start writing fiction again, I think I will nevertheless keep writing this daily blog.  I would hate to leave all my countless readers (heh) high and dry.

Please have a good weekend!

*By “old friend” I mean he’s a friend I’ve known for a long time (almost 40 years!) not that he’s old.  He’s more or less the same age I am, give or take a few months.  I guess that’s “old” from a certain point of view, but it’s not old enough to start collecting retirement benefits.

**This may mean that, overall, I’ve drawn the most pictures of that character, but the pictures are of very different quality to one’s I’ve drawn as an adult.

by

“And by a sleep to say we end the heartache…”

I am really groggy this morning.  I feel as if I slept very poorly, or at least not nearly enough.  Of course, both of those things tend to be true pretty much every night on which I don’t literally sedate myself.  But somehow I’m really feeling it today.

Usually, I’m so tense overall that even though I sleep poorly, I’m still alert bordering on hyperalert.  Maybe now I’ve had such poor sleep for so long that it’s finally catching up with me and wearing me down.  Or perhaps one might say it is Breaking Me Down.  [That was a shameless plug.  BTW, my songs are also available on Spotify and iTunes, and you can choose them as background music for Instagram and (so I’m told) even TikTok.]

Of course, it may be that I actually slept better than usual last night, but it was simply not enough of such better sleep, so I’m feeling very mentally tired because I started to get some rest, but have by no means made up for my deficit.  Does that make sense?

I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  I guess if I somehow develop better sleep and begin to be better rested, it will gradually produce some effects.  I don’t know what such effects might be.  Perhaps such sleep would improve my creativity, my energy, my optimism, what have you.

Maybe I would start writing fiction again.  Maybe I would start writing music again.  Maybe I would start drawing and painting again.  Maybe I would find the energy really to study the physics and mathematics I want to study, and even to master more of the science of biological and machine intelligence.

And maybe I would catch the flying pig to go take a skiing trip in Hell.  Unfortunately, I do not know how to ski (except in principle).  Also, snowboarding looks like it would be more fun.  In any case, I think such activities would be very hard on my joints and back.  But who knows?  Maybe if I were able to get enough sleep for long enough, even my chronic pain would improve.

We know how crucial sleep must be, because every single creature with a nervous system seems to do it, even though it puts us all into a vulnerable state at least part of every day.  If there were a way around it, you’d think that some creature would have developed that capacity, but the closest we have is things like dolphins and other marine and aquatic creatures that sleep with half their brains at a time.

That’s pretty remarkable and cool, when you think about it.  I know that not just marine mammals and some reptiles do this, but also some birds do it.

I also had Mark Reed do something akin to this in Mark Red.  As he developed into what he was becoming (a demi-vampire) he stopped needing to sleep at all, and Morgan (a full vampire) speculated that maybe during the day his vampire half slept, while at night his human half slept.

Of course, he was a supernatural being, so parallels with even the most esoteric of real creatures are at best quite a stretch.  It’s all pretty much a stretch for me, as well, though I am certainly not a supernatural being.  I’m quite weird, but that’s not the same.

Mind you, as I’ve said before, in reality there can be no such thing as the supernatural (at least as I would straightforwardly define the term) because anything that actually exists‒no matter how bizarre or inexplicable‒is part of nature, and so is natural.  If ghosts exist*, then ghosts are natural.  If vampires exist** then vampires are natural.  If Cthulhu and Azathoth and Nyarlathotep exist***, then they are natural as well.

Nature is big.  It’s not just the biosphere of Earth.  It’s the whole capital-U Universe, by which I mean everything, even if there is a multiverse or many different levels of multiverses.  It’s what I might call the Omniverse, as I did in The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I had planned on referring to it as the metaverse, starting from well over 20 years ago, but then Fuckerberg stole the term and applied it to his lame-ass would-be virtual reality thing.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  I suppose he has his uses.  I don’t know whether his existence is a net positive or a net negative, and such measures are always dependent upon what criteria one uses to judge things, anyway.  And as long as one is fairly rigorous and consistent and careful in applying one’s criteria, I would say that all such evaluations are reasonably valid within their own bailiwicks.  My own frustration, though perhaps likewise valid by those measures, is a bit petty and somewhat pathetic, even from my own point of view.

What else is new?

Not very much, I’m afraid.  Details change from moment to moment, though even that depends to some degree upon one’s perspective.  Certainly no human, nor indeed any manner of finite mind, has ever had or can ever have all the answers.  The best we can do is to try always to increase our knowledge, to improve our understanding.  It may take forever to learn every possible thing there is to know, but what better way could there be to spend eternity?

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, even though you can only learn and improve a finite amount in that time.  It’s good enough.

*They almost certainly do not.

**They also almost certainly do not, unless you count the bats and other blood-eating parasites like mosquitoes and fleas and the Masai people.

***Alas, even these beings almost certainly do not really exist.

by

Is this optimism?

Well, it’s Monday again.  That probably wouldn’t make as good a song title as It’s Raining Again by Supertramp, but I imagine it could be a nicely melancholy ditty.  That’s unlike the weirdly chipper, upbeat impression of that Supertramp tune, which certainly didn’t feel like someone lamenting the rain or a love that was at an end.

Perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention to the deeper meaning of the song.  Honestly, I don’t remember many of the lyrics, and that usually means I never really got into it.  If I get into a song‒assuming I can understand them‒I tend to remember the lyrics indefinitely.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I get a particular song, of course.  I may not really relate to a song, but like it nevertheless.  Sometimes it’s just about the music and the beat.

Of course, my understanding of a song may evolve with time, and it may be different from what the songwriter(s) intended.  This is fair game, as far as I can see, once a song is released for public consumption.  It’s certainly fair for other people to interpret my songs however they wish, for themselves.

For instance there are two Radiohead songs that I interpret differently from the way most people seem to interpret them (based on comments online).  The first is Lift which was one of the OKComputer era songs that was left off that album but released on OK/notOK.  Its tone apparently felt too upbeat for the rest of the album at the time of initial release.

But to me, the feeling the song and lyrics invoke is not of a person being literally rescued from being stuck in a lift, but being rescued from their life (which is close in spelling to “lift”) and escaping into the comparative freedom of death.  “Empty all your pockets, ‘cause it’s time to come home.”  It feels like such a release.

The ending may seem to be slightly against that, but Thom does sing “Today is the first day of the rest of your days” not the rest of your life as the saying usually goes.  I don’t know for sure if Thom intended it as I take it, but given the tone of songs like No Surprises and Exit Music (for a film) I don’t think it’s a huge leap.

I have a similar interpretation of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi which has such lines as “everybody leaves if they get the chance/and this is my chance/I’ll get eaten by the worms and weird fishes/picked over by the worms/and weird fishes” and of course the song’s repeated last line(s), “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

I sometimes feel that Thom has (or maybe had) a similar feeling that life was…well, perhaps not torture but just terribly stressful and loud and full of unpleasant sensations and expectations and that it often becomes too much and one just wants to stop, to escape, to “come home”‒just to cease.

As I understand it, that’s kind of the idea of at least some versions of Buddhism:  the desire* to escape the cycle of karma and rebirth, to stop having to live.  But if you don’t believe in reincarnation‒and I really, really don’t‒then escaping from that cycle is as easy as just dying.  And dying is what happens when you stop taking actions necessary to live; death is the default state.

Of course, pushing in the other direction is the eons of natural selection that chose ancestors for their tendency to try to stay alive and thereby become ancestors.  Creatures that had no drive to continue despite pain or fear did not tend to leave that many offspring.  This is true across all Kingdoms, Phyla, Classes, Orders, Families, Genuses, and Species.  Natural selection is a merciless filter; it selects for life, even if life is torture.

So by the time humans (and humanoids) grew minds sufficient to contemplate whether these are worthwhile drives, it/they was/were long since embedded deeply into our natures‒deeper than the level of the nervous system, but also permeating that.

Wow, I didn’t really expect to go off on that tangent.  I thought I was going to mention that there are songs that lament Mondays but also some that seem to celebrate it and then go somewhere from there.  I guess that notion didn’t grab my attention enough.

Maybe I’m just chronically depressed and overwhelmed and stressed out and tired of trying to fight against feeling these things, of trying to want to continue.  There is nowhere that I feel that I “belong”, certainly nowhere available to me now.  I have very little energy for anything beyond stupid basic animal survival, and I’m not doing great at that.

And I’m in pain all the fucking time, even when I’m asleep.  How can I know that I’m in pain when I’m asleep?  Because I fall asleep in pain and the pain is then often what wakes me up, and just as one has a background time sense when sleeping, there is a background awareness of, or at least a background presence of, pain.

I’m very tired of it all.  There are not enough positive things to counterbalance the negative.  There may be plenty of people out there who truly love being alive‒many of the worst people seem to enjoy their lives quite thoroughly, providing strong counter-evidence against any kind of natural justice‒but I don’t.  I am basically alone, sitting around and stewing in my self-dislike.

I must be, in some weird way, the most idiotic optimist I know, because I’m still here, as if I expect at least a decent chance of things getting better at some point in the future.

But really, I don’t expect things to get better.  I can see no good reason to continue with the curve of my mental state so far below the x-axis all the time.  I’m just making the net integral of my life more and more negative with each instant, with each infinitesimal, that I live.

All that being said, I nevertheless hope that you all have a good day and a good week.

*Of course, in the end, as I understand it, the outcome of practice is to lose any sense of desire, and by doing so, one loses the tendency to experience dukkha.  The path ceases to be the means to a goal, but is, if anything, the goal itself…or rather, the concept of goal ceases to mean much.

by

“And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone…”

It’s Friday, and I feel as though I’ve recently run an ultra-marathon‒except that, if I were in the habit of running ultra-marathons, I think I would be more physically fit.  I like running, actually; I used to get that famous “runner’s high” endorphin rush, and it made me feel that if I just pushed a little bit extra with my next step, I could take off and fly.

Alas, my chronic pain has made it very difficult to do regular jogging and/or running.  I still like to walk, but I have to be careful.  In any case, pain saps my energy even for walking, and for many other seemingly minor things.

I’ve had a lot of pain this week, in my usual places as well as in my more newly encroached-upon regions, like my right hand/wrist/forearm/elbow.  I wish I could sleep better, just to escape from it, but my sleep has also been even worse than usual this week.

I’m stressed by the laundry machine thing as well, of course.  I’ve had to wear old backup clothes and buy quite a few new pieces of clothing, chewing up some of my savings, such as they are, and that’s so frustrating.

I hate my life, but I’m stuck in a sort of slight local bump in the middle of a huge surrounding value-sink, a kind of one-person Nash equilibrium.  There is almost nothing in my life (my daily life, anyway) that is much good, but to change my life would nevertheless at least temporarily make everything worse, and there is no way of knowing if it would ever get better.

So, I do nothing but what you “see”, waiting here for the branch* to break, which I’m sure it will do before very long at all.  It could be today; I would not be surprised.  I barely had the energy to go back to the house after work last night, and I can barely get going to go to work this morning (though I am doing it).

I don’t know why I do it.  It’s probably more out of habit and training than anything else.  Not only do I find no lasting happiness or fulfilment, I have no even momentary peace of mind.  I just occasionally get so exhausted that I am able to become unconscious, but that lasts a very short time before I sort of start awake, as if I’ve heard enemy troops going through the jungle nearby.

I’ve never fought any wars in any jungles, of course.  But I just don’t ever feel safe**.  And I certainly have no squad, no fellowship, nor even any partner with whom to share the watch or whatever.

Lone tigers can do well, I guess, since that is their nature.  But wolves and humans and humanoids (like me) are not really at our best when alone.  That was why in the ancestral environment, ostracism was such a serious punishment.  A human alone on the Serengeti thirty thousand years ago was a human who was unlikely to survive for long, let alone to leave any offspring.

It’s appropriate for something like I am, I suppose.  If I were worth being around, there would probably be people around me.  But whatever compensations I was able to generate in the past to make my weirdness worth tolerating, I don’t have the energy or the will‒or the skill, to be thorough‒to bring those things to bear.  I’m not even sure what they are anymore.

Oh, well.  It’s not like there’s any reason to suspect that anyone else knows what they’re doing or has many true, deep insights.  There are a few people here and there in history who figure out useful things, but everyone is merely flesh and blood.  Their minds and wills and insights are markedly finite.  One can learn what one can from them, but one can expect no deep, final answers.

There may be no such deep, final answers.  The universe shows no evidence of having been built for us, after all.  We are just epiphenomena.  Don’t let anyone try to fool you with any ridiculous “fine-tuning” argument(s).  The universe is not fine-tuned for us.  There is almost nowhere in the universe where we can survive.  I made a video that more or less talked about this, if I recall correctly.  Even the Earth is largely hostile to us, and it’s by far the most livable place in the known universe.

The fine-tuning claims remind me a bit of people who say that natural immunity is adequate (or even best) and that we don’t need vaccines.  People can imagine this to be true only because they are the recipients of the world their ancestors created: a world where there are few deadly diseases that wipe people out in childhood the way they used to, because of measures like vaccines.

Or‒to think of other people who speak and act out of ignorance of what it has taken to make the world in which they find themselves‒we have those who decry capitalism as fundamentally evil all while writing on their laptops and tablets and smartphones and driving their electric cars to get overpriced coffee-like dessert beverages from international coffee chains.

Don’t even get me started on flat-earthers.  The frikking ancient Greeks and Egyptians and Phoenicians and all those ancient civilizations knew the Earth was round.  Eratosthenes even figured out how big it was, to within a few percent of our modern measurements, about 2200 years ago.

No intelligent people who paid attention and thought things through (or cared) ever really thought the Earth was flat.  If the Earth were flat, on a clear day you could climb to the top of a high building and essentially see to the edge in all directions.  With a good enough telescope and no interfering mountains, you could peep through someone’s Tokyo window from Chicago.  The Earth is not flat.

I, however, am a flat person‒not in the sense of being roughly planar, but rather in the sense that all my fizz is gone; my pep and vigor are asymptotically approaching zero.

At least it’s Friday.  Maybe next week will be better.

I doubt it, though.

*Or the camel’s back, if you prefer.

**I’m actually not safe, of course.  No one ever is.  But there are gradations of safety, and probability rules ordinary reality.  When risk is low enough, one should ideally feel quite different, much more even-keeled, than when risk is high.  Unfortunately, that’s often not how things are.

by

For they blog between term and term, and then they perceive not how time moves

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so of course I’m writing my “traditional” blog post, with my “traditional” salutation and ending.  I haven’t written the ending yet, but I will, and of course, when you’re reading this, I will have already written those four closing letters—like a vortex manipulator, it’s a kind of cheap and nasty time travel.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, the device formerly known as a laptop computer (to me, at least), because I thought it would be good to write my traditional Thursday post on my traditional type of device.  It’s all very exciting, obviously.

Except of course that it is not exciting.  Nothing is exciting.  There are many worrisome and alarming and infuriating and disgusting things happening in the world and in my pseudo-life, but they are not exciting.

I can’t even feel one of my turns coming on.  Rather, I think I’ve been in “one of my turns” in a low-key way for quite some time now.

I’m very tired.

I wish getting out the lapcom got me fired up to write some new fiction.  I certainly have plenty of story ideas and plots and whatnots in the back of my mind.  But I have no energy to act on them.  By the end of any given workday, I can barely drag myself onto the train to go back to the house, to be honest.

Then, of course, there’s the current washing machine problem.  The machine has finally been delivered, but the old, broken machine is still in place, so the new one hasn’t been installed, and I’m not sure when it will be.  I’m eating into my savings, such as they are, buying new clothes in the meantime.

The need to buy new clothes is particularly irritating, because—quite apart from the expense—I had no desire to buy any, possibly ever again.  New clothes are for people who have a future toward which they look with at least some degree of positive anticipation.  I do not see my own future with any good feelings.

Speaking of the future and not having one and also writing fiction, I thought of an amusing, cautionary tale, a fable of sorts, recently.  Imagine a young man—this sort of story really only works with such a protagonist—who finds a literal genie in a lamp and is given the traditional three wishes.

For his first wish, this young man asks for the ability to stop other people (and things) in time, imagining/planning various nefarious deeds he might undertake while people are “frozen”.  The genie is puzzled and seems troubled, but he grants this first wish.  Soon, the young man finds himself in a situation where he wants to test the power, but when he turns it on a chosen target, as soon as he does, the person just…vanishes.

The young man summons the genie, saying the power didn’t work, panicking a bit about what happened.  The genie explains that the person for whom he stopped time vanished because they simply did not continue past the point in time at which they had been frozen.  So, they did not exist in any future time, and they never would.

The genie had wondered why the young man wanted that power, but he had granted it.  Unfortunately, this deed cannot be readily undone; they cannot bring the person out of the past using the young man’s power as it is.  To change that power and to bring the person back would require the use of the two remaining wishes.

Will the young man choose to do it?  Will he correct his error?  Or will he continue to have the power, now using it as a weapon rather than the for the lascivious means for which he had imagined using it?

I admit, it would be kind of interesting to have such a power.  It’s reminiscent of the ability to send people “away” that the main character had in Stranger in a Strange Land.

What would you do with such an ability?  I would probably use it in morally questionable ways, myself.  But there certainly are people about whom it can safely be said that the world would, overall, be better off if they stopped moving forward through time.

Incidentally, this process would not run afoul of the principle of conservation of energy.  That conservation principle, like all physical conservation principles, is dependent upon the symmetry of the system—this was demonstrated by the genius Emmy Noether in her famous theorem.

The conservation of energy is (or, rather, it would be) a consequence* of the time symmetry of the universe.  But the universe is not symmetric in time, not on large enough scales.  So, on large enough scales, energy (and thus also mass) is not conserved.  Locally it tends to be, because locally, time is symmetrical to a good approximation, rather as the local surface of the Earth is approximately flat on a small enough scale…or rather like the way a small enough portion of any continuous curve can be arbitrarily closely matched by a straight segment on a small enough scale.  This latter fact is the source of the power of calculus.

But just as one can have a local hill or curved shape on the surface of the Earth, one could—in principle—violate local conservation of energy given the right available manipulations.  Now, we in the real world cannot do such a thing, at least not right now, but presumably it would not be beyond the power of a genie.

Okay, well, that’s all pretty stupid, I know, but what do you expect?  It’s me, after all.

I hope you or y’all have as good a day as you possibly can, which you will have, since there is no other possibility.  That doesn’t mean it will be a good day.  It will merely be the best possible day you can have, even if it’s horrible.  Still, I do hope that for you, at least, it will be good.

TTFN

*An interesting term to use, given the current subject.  It has a relation to the order of things in time:  con (with) sequence (ordering of things).

by

“Broken branches trip me as I speak.”

Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday…I can’t think of any jokes or plays on words regarding this day of the week that I haven’t already done, probably ad nauseam.  That’s my habit, it seems:  perseveration, repetition, all that stuff.  That’s probably related to the ASD thing.  It’s certainly been with me all my life in one form or another, or at least as far back as I can remember.

Speaking of “as far back as I can remember”:  I think my oldest memory‒certainly one of the oldest‒is of having to be carried out of The Three Caballeros in the main street theater in Disney World (currently known as the Magic Kingdom), because they started shooting their guns.  I remember the noise being painful and terrifying, and I remember someone picking me up and taking me out of the theater.  I would have been about two years old, I believe.

I used to be unable to tolerate loud noises such as fireworks and muskets* and the like.  I also hated getting my hair cut, I remember that; but I also really hated getting it combed, especially since it was so prone to tangles.

Enough pointless recollection.  I don’t even know what I was trying to discuss there.

Ugh.  I don’t even know why I’m doing this, he said, inadvertently quoting Luke Skywalker from The Empire Strikes Back.  I mean, I get the nature of habit, but I don’t want to be a creature that blindly follows habit.  I’ve been trying to improve my own habits, to decrease or eliminate bad ones, to inculcate good new ones (or to reinitiate older habits that were good).

But even those objectives, though “good” in and of themselves from the point of view of having better strength of character or whatever, are also pointless in the end.  If I’m just robotically carrying out “good” habits without joy or friendship or love or anything along those lines, it’s just a Sisyphean task, and I’ve never been convinced by Camus on that subject.  I’ve written about this before, but I’m not sure precisely where and when.

I’ve probably written about all of this before.  Everything is repetitive and dull; it’s so irritating.  The YouTube algorithm is even failing to find me videos in which I have enough interest to distract myself for a moment.  The other social media are likewise tedious to annoying; they’re mostly just online forms of distilled human stupidity.  As if human stupidity weren’t concentrated enough already.

I’m not interested in any new science right now, or math, or computer stuff, or philosophy, or even fiction (new or old).  I have no interest in any movies or shows that are coming out; what a joke that landscape entails.  I also have no interest in listening to or writing or playing music, despite my Radiohead quote in the title of this post.

Oh, yeah, and every day, so much of the day, so much of me hurts.  That takes the bloom off many a potential rose.

I’m not even happy about the fact that it’s October and Halloween is coming.  I have no one with whom to celebrate it.  Ditto for the subsequent celebrations.  Holidays are things people celebrate with other people.  Maybe not all possible kinds of people do it that way, but on this planet it seems pretty consistent.

I thought about it recently, as if for the first time, though I don’t see how it could have been:  For the initial long stretch of my life, I was always around other people, even in my personal life.  I was the third of three children, so my parents and siblings were always about; I even shared a room with my brother until I was high school age.

I was in the same house and school system from K through 12 as they say, so I knew my fellow students and had several good friends.  Then, in college, I had a consistent roommate for all four years‒a most excellent one, I may say‒and another core group of friends.

Then, of course, I got married.  That entailed a bit of a rift with my own family‒I won’t get into that cluster fuck, because no one comes out looking good‒but also became a welcomed part of my then-wife’s family.  Unfortunately, with respect to my prior friends, when I’m away from people I have serious trouble maintaining ties‒this is apparently related to autism, but I’ve always just felt ashamed of it but incapable of doing otherwise.

Then of course I went to med school and residency and lived with my wife, and eventually we had kids, and that was wonderful‒they are wonderful‒but then my injury and chronic pain happened, and I guess my underlying ASD didn’t help me deal with that.

Then I got separated and then got divorced**.  And then I made the foolish (however well-intended they were, which they were) choices that led to me being a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years (minus gain time).

Gradually, more and more, I have been alone by myself, and I am not good at taking care of myself***.  It’s odd; I used to be pretty good at taking care of other people, though I don’t think I have that will anymore, but I’ve never been good at taking care of myself.

And when, over time, everyone you care about goes away, consistently, then whatever your priors were, your Bayesian assessment of probabilities almost has to lead you to a high credence that you are a big part of the problem.

And by “you” I mean, of course, me.

*For instance, at the musket festival at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan…an immensely cool place, by the way.  Greenfield Village, I mean.  I don’t really know anything about the rest of Dearborn, but I expect it’s fine.

**I deliberately put this in the passive voice, because it wasn’t my idea.  I think I would never have sought a divorce‒it’s not really in my nature‒but I wasn’t going to try to coerce someone who didn’t want to be around me to stay around me, despite oaths freely given and all that.  I could never blame someone for finding my company objectionable.

***As for what “self” actually means, I’m using it here informally, just as a general reference to the person writing this blog and about whom it is being written.  There are no deeper metaphysical meanings; you can infer them if you wish, but that doesn’t mean they were implied.

by

“I am Jack’s wasted life…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and honestly, I don’t care or see the point…or, well, some other nearby sentiment to those two.  I’m not sure exactly what sentiment I’m trying to convey, really.  I just feel wound up yet worn out.  It’s been a very annoying weekend.

On Friday, I got back to the house to discover that ice accumulation around the “freezer” area in my half-fridge had pushed the door open, which had led to much more accumulation and also dripping condensation.  This is south Florida, after all; there’s a lot of water in the air.  I ended up having to unplug the fridge and just let it all melt, trying to soak up the water with old shirts (There were no spare towels‒I only had two*).

The wet was a bit too much for the shirts to absorb, but I have a strong floor fan, so I turned it toward that task, instead of cooling me.  I had to throw out pretty much everything in the fridge, but that was not much; I don’t ever have many refrigerable foods.  Like the narrator in Fight Club said:  “A refrigerator full of condiments and no food.  How embarrassing.”

Anyway, the rest of Saturday had a lot of drying of the floor, and a walk to the bank.  Not much else of note took place.  I did dust off my PS4 and try to get it going for the first time in a very long time.  I got it to start after a while‒it seemed almost to have atrophied or gone into some electronic rigor mortis or something.  Anyway, I got it updated after I reset my password, and then played two of my favorite games for about ten minutes each before realizing they were not any fun.

Then, Sunday morning when I went to do my laundry, the washer wasn’t working.  I tried to figure out the problem, and at first it seemed to be an electricity issue.  I tried all the circuit breakers, but they were fine, and the ground fault interrupt was also not sprung.  I got out a long extension cord; I had to depower my fridge (and microwave) to use it, but there was nothing in the fridge by then, anyway.

Power was thus supplied, and I hoped the problem was solved, but it was not.  The washing machine was broken.  Despite various interventions, I could not get it to run.

My laundry, with detergent, was just sitting in the machine.  The landlord tried to get a replacement washer out to us as soon as possible, but his guy was busy elsewhere, and of course, it was Sunday.  So my laundry has not been done this week.  I’ve had to buy some new clothes (and new towels) and get out old clothes I don’t usually wear and so on.  It’s very uncomfortable and unpleasant, as well as expensive.

So, my whole routine has been thrown for a loop, and my routine is all that I have anymore.  I went for quite a long walk on Sunday afternoon once it became clear that the washer replacement wasn’t soon arriving.  It was pretty hot out, but the heat index was one to three degrees below body temperature, so at least normal thermoregulation functioned, more or less, though I got a bit of sunburn.

I walked west along 215th Street, AKA County Line Road, until I got to the place where 215th crosses the Florida Turnpike.  I looked down to see how high the overpass was, but it was disappointing.  If it was done right, a person could probably carefully hang and drop, landing with minimal injury beyond a few scrapes.

Even if one were trying to kill oneself by jumping from there, one would have to go head first (doing it just right) and/or rely on getting killed by traffic.  That would be rude; it would not be okay to traumatize some poor shmoe who’s just going somewhere on the turnpike on a Sunday afternoon.

At that point, I turned around and headed back.  I stopped at a convenience store nearby and bought three beverages, all of which I drank before getting back to the house.

To top everything off for the weekend, one of the stray cats I feed, a quite neurotic and paranoid one, and certainly the oldest of her cohort, died overnight.  She had been (apparently) okay earlier in the day, but maybe she had an infection.  I don’t know.  It doesn’t seem to have been a horrible death, and I guess it was pretty fast.  She wasn’t alone, at least.  The other few cats who tend to stay close to the house were nearby and seemed to have kept her company, at least in some sense.

I don’t know.  I’m probably anthropomorphising.  Still, she had more friends (and probably family, really, when you think about the nature of stray cats) around her when she died than I will likely have when I die.  I honestly don’t know if that’s better or worse.  Maybe it’s not good to subject the people you love to your final hours.

Still, I was regretful and sad (still am) that my Dad died while I was en route to see him for the last time.  And I was glad‒or, well, it was a positive thing, anyway‒to be there with my mother when she died, though I don’t think my presence did any actual good for her.  At least my sister wasn’t there alone.  I guess that was pretty clearly good.

I don’t know what the point of all this is, but in a way, that really is the point, and it makes my point:  there is no use in all that I do, such as this blog.  There is no use in anything.  And I certainly am of no use.

Maybe the social media-ites are right and one shouldn’t have to earn the right to exist, but I have never felt, not for one moment in my life, that I deserve anything just because I’m alive, including my life itself.  Nature is not generous or kind, and as far as I can see, nature doesn’t consider anyone or anything to “deserve” to exist.

I certainly don’t.

*Thanks to other recent events reported here, I bought some more.